Jeff Haws's Blog

My new book cover is here for “The Solitary Apocalypse,” as you may be aware. It’s not exactly a secret at this point. I’m really happy with what I ended up with. Since I just got the proof copy of the print version, I wanted to dive into it a bit and look at why I made the decisions with it that I did.

Here’s the front cover. There are lots of things going on here. First, there’s the tagline: “Live Alone, or Die Together.” I didn’t initially have a tagline, but my cover designer suggested i...

The other day, I was looking at some books featured in one of the many “book deal” emails I get daily, and I stumbled upon a short story where the title was misspelled — on the cover. The friggin’ cover, for god’s sake. And what’s more is it was a one-word title. I mean, seriously.

And, of course, this was a self-published book. It’s careless authors like this one who cause snooty traditionally published authors to roll their eyes and scoff at self-published authors as unprofessional, unser...

As I teased a couple of weeks ago, I’ve written a new (very) short story for the Rave Writers International Society of Authors in an event called Watch RWISA Write, an August-long showcase for the writers in the group. The stories are going to be compiled into an anthology for the group in the near future. There has been a different short story shared on several blogs each day this month, and the quality has been quite good. I definitely recommend checking out #RWISA on Twitter and reading a...

Some of you may know (but you probably don’t) that I’m a member of the Rave Writers International Society of Authors (RWISA), which is basically the fancy “By invite only” division of the Rave Reviews Book Club, which is a big group of writers of wildly varying degrees of writing ability. To get into the RWISA, you had to be invited and then have your writing sample approved by a majority of the five board members. There are currently 40 RWISA members, and eleventy billion RRBC members, as f...

When I was getting ready to publish my first novel, “Killing the Immortals,” last year, I did a good deal of research on the title to make sure there was nothing similar in the marketplace that it would be confused with. I was excited about the title, and wanted to have something unique. Fortunately, there was nothing like it out there, so I plowed forward with it last July.

Suddenly, though, I noticed last week that a Bosnian author self-published a book on June 30 with the title “Killing t...

I had this discussion on Facebook recently, as I consulted with various people on what the title of my upcoming novel should be. On my first book, once “Killing the Immortals” came to me, it was one of those proverbial light bulbs popping up above my head. Maybe literally. I can’t say for sure. But it was fairly bright in the room at the time, so perhaps.

Anyway, I knew right away that was the title. It was striking, a little mysterious, and had a seemingly contradictory nature that I liked....

While my next novel faces my editor’s red pen, I’ve been thinking about how to make this next book release better than my first one. Not that it was a disaster or anything, but I figure I should always try to improve. When you’re a self-published author, it’s all on you. So if you don’t find ways to improve, nobody’s gonna do it for you, and there’s plenty of competition ready to lap you if you’re moving slow.

So, I was looking back at what I did for that first book release, and I picked out...

Been a busy month or so. Spent two weeks wandering around Europe, and worked through the beta-reader edits on my next novel. Just sent it off to my professional editor yesterday, and that means we may see a final product around the beginning of August. You guys may get your hands on this book yet.

Just as I did shove my book out of its protective little nest, I ran across this terrific breakdown of how to pick an editor from the endlessly helpful Shayla from Curiouser Editing. It really goes...

One of the questions I’ve been pondering as I’ve worked on my next short story/novella/whatever it turns out to be is, well, what it’s going to turn out to be. Is there actually enough story here for it to unexpectedly sneak its way to novel status, or will it just settle in as a longer short story?

You might say, just write and see how it turns out. And that seems to make some sense. Does it really matter how long it’s going to be when you start writing it? On the surface, maybe not. But th...

As a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan who writhed happily on the floor after they won their first World Series in 108 years last fall, and who just finished reading Tom Verducci’s terrific new book “The Cubs Way,” I’ve had a lot of time to think about what happened a few months ago. It’s stayed in my mind often and, between the book and the banner raising earlier this week (along with the ring ceremony tonight at Wrigley), I’ve been thinking about it even more lately.

One thing that came to mind wa...